The treasure-trove of genomic data comes from a consortium of 50 British
groups called the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, or WTCCC.

"The field of human genetics has hoped for a decade or more to discover
these genetic variants and how they interact and affect risk of disease,"
WTCCC Chairman Peter Donnelly, PhD, of the University of Oxford, said at a news
conference.

The study already has yielded important new insights into the root causes of
these seven common diseases.

The most important of these insights is that having a gene variant linked to
disease doesn't mean you are fated to get that disease. It only means you're at
higher risk of the disease -- or at lower risk, as some of the genes are linked
to protection against disease.

"These are risk factors, rather than genetics predicting who will get a
disease," Donnelly said. "There is a large other part of the story:
people's diets, and lifestyles, and so on."

The study analyzed the genomes of about 2,000 patients with each disease and
compared their genetic codes to a shared group of about 3,000 healthy
individuals. For each individual in the study, researchers analyzed 500,000
areas of their genomes.

"If you think of the human genome as a very long road where you are
trying to find something in the dark, previously we were able to turn the
lights on only in a very few places," Donnelly said. "It turns out that
by turning on half a million lights along the genome, as we have done, you get
to see a very large proportion of the variation that is there."

The Genetics of Common Diseases

Why look for genes linked to common diseases? The main reason is that very
little is known about what causes these diseases.

"Genetics gives us a completely new way of looking at the problem,"
Donnelly said. "If we can understand the genetic basis of the disease, it
gives us insight into what goes wrong and what triggers the disease. And then
we can move on to develop new treatments and, potentially, new drug
therapies."